The Sage of Waterloo

by Leona Francombe

  It actually wasn’t so bad, nestling against my own piece of earth for a change. It gave me a chance to come to my own conclusions about yesterday, as unformed as they may have been at my young age. I’m not sure if I was recalling something Grandmother had once told us, or if I had actually come up with this myself, but I realized, after our abortive escape, that there’s an optimal time for everything. Casting a furtive glance at Old Lavender, I considered that if she had indeed slipped out herself once, she may have chosen the wrong time, and that’s why she’d come back. Patience is the key. To do something important at the wrong moment is worse than not doing it at all.

  I should have avoided that open gate. The moment had been about as wrong as could be.

  I shifted in the dirt. I’d acted mindlessly, stepping out even before Jonas on an adventure that had ended in death. Now I saw how fitting it had been to name me after the naïve Prince of Orange. Not everyone called his actions “heroic determination,” as Napoleon had. Some accounts show that the Prince had brought destruction to a company of men at Quatre Bras through a deadly mix of impulse and inexperience.

  I didn’t have as many deaths on my conscience as William of Orange, perhaps. But I had Caillou’s. And at that moment, I was sure that no regret, princely or otherwise, could have matched my own.

  My heart ached for the poor runt. I longed for Grandmother to shed some light on what had happened that morning at the South Gate. I mean, think about it: Is a single death—especially the death of a creature that the human species considers insignificant enough to eat—of any universal importance at all in a place where thousands of men have died? (Or in any other place, for that matter?) For the human animal, probably not. But for us . . . for us . . . . Oh, can you not step outside the human mind-set for just a moment and imagine the remorse I felt?

  I studied Old Lavender as she sat alone in our hollow, and began to understand that she wanted me to sort these things out for myself.

  That was the day I grew up.

  4

  Jonas may have been the finest physical specimen of our colony, but I do think (not to be immodest about it) that I was one of the better students. I had the privilege of a higher education, after all, sharing that hollow with our grandmother; and like her, I was also a secret admirer of the Eaton ladies. I tarried at the fence during their visits, tracking each step of their progress around the meadow. Whenever they rested near the dovecote and Old Lavender drew near them, I was never far behind her. I’m sure that the snow-and-moon ladies never dreamed that their reading aloud so close to the Hougoumont rabbit enclosure would be sifted and analyzed by the long-eared matriarch behind the fence, and eagerly stored away by her young apostle.

  Charlotte Eaton herself traveled to Brussels from Ghent on June 15, 1815, accompanied by her brother and sister, and taking the same road along which Napoleon Bonaparte had made his triumphant progress some twenty years before. The French surrendered this territory in 1814—known officially at the time as “the Austrian (Southern) Netherlands”—but Napoleon, of course, would make one more attempt to conquer it at Waterloo.

  As her carriage advanced down the tree-lined chaussée and stopped at inns and hamlets along the way, Charlotte encountered a universal hatred and fear of the former rulers, an emotion that burst forth from villagers spontaneously, “as if they could not suppress it; their whole countenances change; their eyes sparkle with indignation; they seem at a loss for words strong enough to express the bitterness of their detestation.” This lingering spite notwithstanding, the countryside wore the appearance of plenty—of hope, even. Verdant farms, neat cottages and luxuriant corn all signaled prosperity. Barefoot children ran, laughing, behind the carriage and offered flowers. As Charlotte began her journey southward, she naïvely thought that peace was at hand.

  She soon perceived her error.

  In the hot, sultry air of that June two hundred years ago, events were moving behind the scenes with dark swiftness. Charlotte Eaton was perhaps not the most gifted air-reader, it must be said. But if she had studied the details of those days as Old Lavender would have (a Thursday through Sunday, I believe they were)—had perceived the swollen foreboding in them—she would have clearly noticed that Nature was gathering fear and dread to her bosom. The air, forest, soil and all their occupants sensed that human cataclysm was nigh. Even if the natural world wasn’t quite sure when or where, exactly, war was about to break out again, or even that it was Bonaparte himself who happened to be breathing at the door (all human tyrants are alike, after all), a warning had been sounded. Horses and cattle shifted and twitched; small creatures burrowed deep, waiting. The weather brooded, gathered itself and at times broke in brief, violent premonition.

  By the time the Eaton party had arrived in Brussels, the entire city was wearing a military aspect. But how well the magnificence of a soldier masks his job! Charlotte marveled at the tassels and epaulets, the clasps and crosses and braids . . . not things that, when seen on a fine young man, one could ever imagine being darkened with his blood, or left behind in the dirt after he’s been thrown into a communal grave. One didn’t have to imagine it . . . at least, not yet.

  The Eatons entered a city brimming with fine young men. Despite all the rumors charging the air, there was a vigor to the outpost that proved irresistible. The thronged streets pulsed with confidence and expectation, as if something important were about to happen, but to someone else, and not anytime soon. Allied soldiers in every variety of uniform mingled with the locals in convivial groups, or took a turn with the ladies down one of the shaded avenues of the Parc de Bruxelles. There were English soldiers in their red coats and white belts, and hearty, laughing Highlanders, as renowned in battle for their fierceness as for those unimpeachable kilts. Only the so-called Black Brunswickers, a corps under the command of the amiable Duke of Brunswick and kept in reserve by Wellington, offered a bleak counterpoint. They dressed in black, and rode black horses. On their heads they wore shakos decorated with sinister death’s heads and plumes of black horsehair. Their long, regular procession looked “like an immense moving hearse,” Charlotte noted, “that one might take for a bad omen.”

  Twilight drifted in on the humid haze. Dispatches flew from servant to officer, hotelier to guest, washerwoman to valet. The fighting has begun! But how far off do you suppose it is? Are the French in great number? Where are the Prussians? There was no reliable intelligence anywhere. The mood in Brussels traced a great, emotive arc: from the depths of French-fueled panic, to the heights of incredulous relief, and back down to the French again.

  Daylight lingered, as it does during a northern June.

  Night fell.

  After they had dined, officers donned their stockings and dancing shoes. For the Duchess of Richmond’s ball was going ahead as planned.

  Now, I would like to reduce the stage of events a bit, if I may—well, quite a lot, actually. Specifically, to the size of our hutch. For it was there, in the pleasant fug of dozing family members, that Old Lavender occasionally took us to the Duchess of Richmond’s ball.

  Grandmother wasn’t much of a sentimentalist, as you’ve probably gathered by now, her preference leaning more towards military strategy—battle formations, cavalry charges and the like. So it wasn’t often that she told us this story. I suspect that she had to force the dreamy tone she used for the ball scene—not an easy feat for such a hard-boiled old rabbit. Her efforts succeeded, however, for I had only to close my eyes to step easily into that long, low-ceilinged room.

  The Duke of Richmond had rented the space in Rue de la Blanchisserie from his neighbor in Brussels, a coach builder. Richmond himself was in charge of a reserve force to protect Brussels in case of a surprise invasion by Napoleon. Bonaparte was a wily adversary, after all. One never knew with him. But despite conflicting reports of his movements, it was thought that the emperor was still quite a way off, and under the circumstances, perhaps a bit of merrymaking might keep fate from the door for a few more hours.
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  In retrospect, the ball was a gathering of butterflies at the foot of a smoking volcano.

  The “volcano” was Quatre Bras: the crossroads south of Waterloo that would turn out to be the prelude to full-scale eruption. I’d heard about those crossroads. Old Lavender always mentioned them whenever she talked about the ball, so we wouldn’t forget that war had been biding its time. Just out there, she would say, indicating the door of the hutch. Just outside the Richmonds’ window.

  Quatre Bras used to be an obscure country intersection (literal meaning: “four arms”). Towering corn, dense woodland and only four gabled cottages, shut and alert, marked the spot. Everything shimmered in a mirage of heat. And the stillness . . . not of bucolic peace, but that other kind . . . the kind that presages an earthquake, or a tempest. No creature could have ignored it.

  “Oh, the animals knew what was about to happen,” Grandmother said. “Those who could, fled. The others . . .” She paused dramatically. “The others could only pull into their shells for protection, or crawl down to their deepest chambers. Remember your Thomas Hardy!”

  And we did—well, most of us only remembered the part about the fleeing coneys. But I had memorized the rest of Hardy’s Waterloo poem, and even whispered it aloud now and then, just to honor our doomed neighbors, though invariably I had to stop after the worm, sick-hearted:

  . . . The worm asks what can be overhead,

  And wriggles deep from a scene so grim,

  And guesses him safe; for he does not know

  What a foul red flood will be soaking him! . . .

  The Richmonds’ dancing and dining went on until the early hours. How well Old Lavender described it, her military preferences notwithstanding! So well that I can hear the music even now: the jaunty dances and gliding tunes; the genteel stomping on parquet floors. I can smell the warm, humid air, too, thick with perfume and the mushroomy promise of dinner (not necessarily rabbit, we were assured). The low room was decorated with rose-trellised wallpaper, and rich draperies of crimson, gold and black. Pillars were wreathed in ribbons and flowers. They danced reels and cotillions. The list of beauty and chivalry glittered. Handsome lads in uniform took care with their grips, accustomed as they were to gun barrels and not the feminine upper arm. The Prince of Orange and Duke of Wellington were themselves guests, but only in passing, as they were just hours away from the first salvos of battle. No one could describe it better than Grandmother:

  On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; . . .

  . . . But hark!—that heavy sound breaks in once more,

  As if the clouds its echo would repeat;

  And nearer, clearer, deadlier than before;

  Arm! arm! it is—it is—the cannon’s opening roar!

  Some of you may have noticed that these are not, in fact, the words of Old Lavender, but those of Lord Byron, though one can hardly blame her for overlooking such a thing in the heat of storytelling. For our part, we couldn’t have cared less. By the time Old Lavender was quoting Byron, we had long since left the hutch for the ball.

  The evening’s most eminent guests would miss their supper, alas. At around ten, a dispatch arrived for the Prince of Orange from Quatre Bras, announcing that the French had repulsed the Prussians northeast of Charleroi, a surprising skirmish, and far nearer than expected. The Prince slipped away from the party at once; Wellington continued to smile politely for another twenty minutes or so before slipping out himself.

  A bugle sounded on the Place Royale before dawn, and then another: the unmistakable call to arms. Drums instantly set up their beating. Bagpipes blared the pibroch—the Highland martial summons. The commotion woke Charlotte Eaton and her sister in their hotel room overlooking the place. (They had not been invited to the ball.) They gazed out at the tumult and confusion of arms clanging, orders shouted, wagons rolling heavily by. Women could even be seen mounting their horses to follow their husbands into battle.

  At the Richmonds’, officers were asked to leave the ball quietly and rejoin their units. Soldiers hastened into the night, shuffling and unsure. They turned back to their loved ones many times, unable as they were to face the last, inevitable turn back. Musket butts rang on the cobbles. Chargers neighed and skittered over the slick stones, the clatter punctuated by loud, deep-toned commands. Some soldiers were still wearing their silk stockings and dancing pumps as they marched off to fight.

  Quite a few would never go dancing again.

  Many conflicting accounts have been written about Quatre Bras.

  “In my opinion” (Grandmother always ended her ball story with this comment), “it was Prince William of Orange who took the initiative and held off the French until reinforcements arrived. He doesn’t get enough credit, I don’t think. He made some ill-considered decisions on the battlefield, it’s true. He was only twenty-three, after all. But he had guts, that boy. Napoleon said as much himself, during one of his many idle moments on St. Helena.”

  I knew that Grandmother considered the Prince a foolish lad in many ways. But she also called him brave and impulsive, and that comment more than made up for any slight implied by naming me after him. She also said: “Nothing is worse than knowing you might have done something and didn’t.”

  She insisted that Wellington had gone to the ball uneasily, just to maintain public morale. It was not a carefree affair, William.

  Indeed.

  But I never paid much attention whenever Old Lavender tried to dampen my pleasure in the ball. I just couldn’t repress that image of the Duke, gazing mistily at the trellised wallpaper, his heart softening to some lady or other while of course in reality, as he was politely nodding and smiling at the ladies, he was busy evaluating, strategizing, galvanizing and postulating, among many other activities of four syllables or more with which inferior men have scant acquaintance.

  When news reached the ball that Napoleon had crossed the frontier, Wellington and Richmond ducked into the latter’s dressing room.

  “Napoleon has humbugged me, by God!” Wellington declared. “He has gained twenty-four hours’ march on me.”

  The two men pored over a map. Wellington placed his thumbnail on a small village nine miles south of Brussels: Waterloo. “If we will not stop him at Quatre Bras, I must fight him here.”

  You can see how, as a young romantic, I preferred a mistier version of the ball.

  I never much cared who won or lost, or who said what to whom, whenever I went to the Richmonds’. I never had trouble finding that soft, redolent, richly hued space in my head. Perhaps it was the proximity of family before falling asleep—the muffle of fur and gamey humidity that, together with Grandmother’s soothing drone, somehow metamorphosed the hutch into a more exalted setting. Even now, when I have trouble falling asleep, I drift off to that splendid ballroom. I imagine the tap of dancing shoes against the wooden floor; the whoosh of silk; the murmuring elegance. And always, before sleep overtakes me, I can see the red-coated Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington, taking a turn around the floor, his face set with deeper concerns. His boots made no sound, of course. He was above that sort of thing. He wasn’t entirely in focus, either, but shimmered hazily, like the early autumn mists at the far end of the meadow. His high embroidered collar kept his chin aloft, and the golden braid over his shoulder swung as he moved. And in his eyes, the cool, even shine of duty . . .

  “You mustn’t idolize Wellington too much, William.” No one could spoil a good reverie like Grandmother. “There’s nothing more boring than a fairy-tale hero. Did you know that his mother described him as ‘awkward,’ and that he was an unremarkable student? He could be cold, aloof, controlling. And I bet you didn’t know that his soldiers called him ‘Old Nosey’ on account of that prominent feature of his.”

  I wasn’t sure what she was getting at with all this. I’d never met anyone as cold, aloof and controlling as Old Lavender could be, though I loved her dearly. We all have our faults, don’t we? Maybe those “boring” heroes, so irritatingly glorious, have
a special role to play in making up for all of our own shortcomings, even if in reality their exploits are far from perfect.

  I rarely countered my grandmother to her face, on this or any other subject. But I must confess that Wellington’s indifferent school performance, his coldness, his prominent nose . . . none of it tarnished the strapping, broad-shouldered Duke who glided across my imagination, and whom I would have happily called “Old Nosey” had I been fortunate enough to be born in his era, as something other than what I was, wearing a red uniform.

  The fighting at Quatre Bras was so fierce that it could be heard in Brussels, almost eighty kilometers away. The cannonade continued unabated throughout the day of June 16, filling the population with terror and suspense. No one could be sure what was happening at the front. Rumors confirmed the worst—that the French would soon invade the town—only to be contradicted by stragglers from the battlefield, or citizens coming to their own, random conclusions.

  On street corners, in shops, at pâtisseries and cafés, residents clapped their cheeks in despair. The Belgians have abandoned their arms and fled! The French are advancing on Brussels, nom de Dieu! Scuffles erupted on city squares. Idiot, what are you saying? That old rascal Blücher has given the French a thrashing!

  Nothing, and no one, could be believed.

  People rushed home to gather their possessions for flight. The Parc de Bruxelles, so recently the scene of splendid uniforms and strolling ladies, was deserted. Charlotte Eaton wandered its paths and lingered on the city’s boulevards and squares, hoping for news. By the end of the day, it seemed as if the cannons were growing ever louder and nearer. Towards nine in the evening, there was one tremendous, final burst, and at length the sound diminished and faded away.